Fonograf Editions’ e-newsletter
May 2026
Some days we look just like how we are perceived: foreigners, fussing. In the classroom of English: the low podium of commas, the plastic seats of pronouns. Have you seen Eurovision, where most nations sing in English? Afterwards we’d wonder: how much Kafka is in my Kafka?
—Xuela Zhang, from To Compare
Fonograf Editions is thrilled to announce the winner of the annual Open Genre Book Prize, as selected by contest judge Brandon Shimoda
Winner:
Sara Akant’s The Kingdom Book of Perihan
Editors’ Selections:
Rivka Clifton’s Action
Harper Quinn’s New Nudes
Finalists:
Hannah Liberman’s NO ONE
Madeleine Wattenberg’s The Iron Hypothesis
Emily Bark Brown’s Except Maybe I Love You
Geronimo Sarmiento’s weeds
Nicholas Maione’s Ochre as a Kingdom
Read editor and co-publisher Jeff Alessandrelli’s essay on our blog and learn about this year’s contest.
Congratulations to the winner, editors’ selections, and finalists. Thank you to Brandon Shimoda for judging this year’s contest.
Fonograf Editions is excited to announce its partnership with The Elephants, an open-genre, independent press that works in Victoria, British Columbia, on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen, Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples; and in Portland, Oregon, on the lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla and other tribes. Learn more about The Elephants, check out its catalog, and keep an eye out for its annual reading period in May and June.
This newsletter’s Q&A features Sara Larsen, author of the poetry collection Detonated Mirror, published by The Elephants in September 2023.
3 Questions with Sara Larsen, author of Detonated Mirror
- What inspired you to write Detonated Mirror?
I wouldn’t so much say I was inspired to write Detonated Mirror as I was compelled to explore many kinds of visionary-tinged poetry experiments over a period of life that was personally full of change. My experiences didn’t define these poems, but they informed their anarchic, lyrical spirit, perhaps also their wild interludes with form, breath, line, syntax. I love playing with language, I love finding out what language might suggest, and what interplay might exist between my own mind and the mind of the poem itself. I would say that Detonated Mirror is a somewhat surrealist, prismatic result of poetic experimentation – an art practice I continue today.
- What does your writing process look like?
These days, I often wake up before dawn to write on the back deck. It’s a magical, completely quiet time, and I love being awake when all the birds apparently agree to sing at once. I start new drafts in notebooks; I love pencils and pens and the gravity of the hand. I work on “newbie” poems on my laptop later. Having close writer friends and interlocutors is essential to me. I need to hear their work, and I need them to hear mine. I recently discovered I’m an extrovert (could it be true?). Perhaps these crucial exchanges that include rigorous attention to each others’ work, is the extroverted aspect of creativity for me.
- Do you have a favorite poem or a poet whose work you often return to?
It has to be “Revolutionary Letter # 75”, also known as “Rant”, by Diane di Prima. This is the poem I return to over and over and over in my life. It is a declaration for the centrality of the imagination and the power of poetry and art-making to re-envision the world.